{"id":10044,"date":"2017-11-01T05:36:35","date_gmt":"2017-11-01T05:36:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.environment-hawaii.org\/?p=10044"},"modified":"2019-02-12T23:59:37","modified_gmt":"2019-02-12T23:59:37","slug":"10044","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/?p=10044","title":{"rendered":"New & Noteworthy: `Aina Le`a, Kona Spaceport"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Progress on the \u2018Aina Le\u2018a Front:<\/strong> In September, the planning firm of Belt Collins delivered to the Hawai\u2018i County Planning Department a draft supplemental environmental impact statement preparation notice for the roughly 1,000 acres of Urban land owned by \u2018Aina Le\u2018a, Inc., and the 2,000 or so acres of Agricultural land surrounding it owned by Bridge \u2018Aina Le\u2018a.<\/p>\n

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On October 13, planning director Michael Yee responded. He explained that the county \u201cwill not be the accepting authority … because a State Land\u00a0Use District Boundary Amendment is being sought and approval … of the boundary amendment will be required from the State Land Use Commission before the project\/ action can be implemented.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition, Yee identified a number of problems with the draft SEISPN. It \u201cshould provide an overview of the existing development that has occurred on the property\u201d and should \u201cidentify the need for the project and timing\u201d and \u201cprovide the basis for warranting [the] density increase\u201d represented by changing the Ag land to the Rural classification \u2013 thereby allowing an additional 1,400 house sites in the area.<\/p>\n

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Little Progress on Spaceport Front:\u00a0<\/strong>The Office of Aerospace Development within the state Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism, is once again seeking no-cost renewals to two contracts that are intended to result in the Kona airport being licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration as a facility for the horizontal launch of reusable space vehicles. If all goes as planned, those vehicles will carry \u201csatellites, experimental payloads, and tourists to space,\u201d the OAD said in its latest report to the Legislature.<\/p>\n

Yet for some years now, the OAD has been saying the same thing, with little progress to show. In 2012, it signed a $500,000 no-bid contract with a consulting firm to develop an environmental assessment for the project. The EA is still undelivered, and in October the office asked for a no- cost extension of the contract. Work on a separate $80,000 contract to prepare an FAA application for the facility is pretty much on hold until the EA is completed, said Jeffrey Pang, OAD administrator.<\/p>\n

Since the 2012 contract was signed, Pang said, \u201cwe\u2019ve had some hiccups along the way.\u201d Chief among them, he said, the Department of Transportation \u201cmoved the site on us and the consultant\u201d \u2013 RS&H \u2013 \u201chad to redocument everything.\u201d Now the hang-up is that the revised airport layout plan for the Kona airport must receive conditional approval from the FAA before the environmental assessment can be completed, he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Progress on the ‘Aina Le‘a Front: In September, the planning firm of Belt Collins delivered to the Hawai‘i County Planning Department a draft supplemental environmental impact statement preparation notice for the roughly 1,000 acres of Urban land owned by ‘Aina … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9745,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[428],"tags":[450,7],"class_list":["post-10044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-november-2017","tag-aina-lea","tag-patricia-tummons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}